My maternal grandfather used to say,

“If we had some bacon, we could have bacon and eggs. If we had some eggs.”

Having assumed this was his own invention, I now find that this goes back at least to Groucho, and perhaps to World War I.

Li Manshan likes this line, identifying the sentiment with his memories of privation.

This photo, indeed, would have been taken in the late 1950s, just when Yanggao people were starving.